General ⇒ Change the way chapter references are set

[jbiggs2]

So the graduate school has told me they want every heading label to end with a period, i.e chapters start with "Chapter I." and sections start "A. Section Title" and so forth.

I took care of that with the simple command

\def\thechapter{\Roman{chapter}.}

But now when I make reference to a previous chapter, using the \ref{} command, the resulting text looks like "Chapter I. deals specifically blah blah" and I can't stand the look of that extra period. Am I wrong here, and it is perfectly normal way to reference previous chapters? Is there some way to change the way a label is displayed when called using \ref ?